Richard W. Evans is a macroeconomist whose work sits at the intersection of public economics, computational methods, and open-source software. He is Senior Economist at the Abundance Institute in Salt Lake City and is Director and Founder of the Open Source Economics Laboratory (OSE Lab). Evans was also the President and Co-Founder of Open Research Group, Inc. (OpenRG), an open source policy modeling consultancy, from June 2016 to September 2026.
His research and policy work develops large-scale overlapping generations (OLG) macroeconomic models for the dynamic analysis of fiscal policy. He is a core maintainer of the open-source OG-Core macroeconomic model and its country calibrations — including United States, United Kingdom, Philippines, South Africa, Ethiopia, Indonesia, and India — which are used by researchers and policy institutions to quantify the macroeconomic and distributional effects of tax and budget reforms and demographic changes.
Evans has held previous positions at the University of Chicago, Becker Friedman Institute, Tax Policy Center, Center for Growth and Opportunity, Rice University, and Brigham Young University. He has founded, funded, and directed two major open-source and open-access student mentoring computational economics research and training programs — Open Source Economics Laboratory (OSE Lab), University of Chicago 2017-2020 and BYU Macroeconomics and Computational Laboratory, Brigham Young University 2012-2016. Evans has also spent time as a researcher at the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress, the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Utah Economic Council, and as an economic consultant. He is a strong advocate for open-source methods, reproducibility, and transparency in economic policy analysis.
Evans earned his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Texas at Austin in 2008. He is a co-author of the forthcoming books Redesigning Aging: The Ethics and Economics of Human Longevity (Harvard University Press) and Overlapping Generations Models for Policy Analysis: Theory and Computation.
Fields of specialization
- Macroeconomics
- Public economics
- Computational economics
- International macroeconomics
- Open source policy modeling
Education
- Ph.D., Economics — University of Texas at Austin, 2008
- M.S., Economics — University of Texas at Austin, 2005
- M.A., Public Policy — Brigham Young University, 2003
- B.A., Economics — Brigham Young University, 1998